Sometimes SCAD Depresses Me, Part Infinity

I’m done with finals, and have a brief respite from school, so I can finally collect my thoughts long enough to write a semi-coherent blog post. I’ve also moved into an apartment, and two of my roomates are women who are heavily involved in SCAD’s (Savannah College of Art & Design) film department. One is a film major, the other is a dramatic writing major with a film minor. Both are amazingly talented individuals.

They both went to the Scademy Awards, which is SCAD’s version of the Academy Awards, in which individuals in the film department nominate studeint films for awards.

According to my roommates, not a single woman in the film department was nominated/won an award for their work.

There are approximately 1,000 students in SCAD’s film department. Surely there is at least one woman in the film/dramatic writing department who is making award-winning work.

SCAD loves to boast about preparing their students for the “real world”. But misogyny and underrepresentation of women within the film industry is not a “real world” quality that a very expensive institute of higher learning should be promoting.

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§ 6 Responses to Sometimes SCAD Depresses Me, Part Infinity

This seems like very faulted anger. You’re SURE there was a woman doing award-worthy work? Is the claim that there was not a single “individual”, male or female, that would dare nominate a woman out of fear of…. [I don’t even know what to suggest here]? It seems entirely possible that all of the VERY best films were directed, produced, shot and edited by men. It’s a little silly to say SCAD is promoting a gender bias, especially if the students are the ones nominating films. It’s even more silly to tag this with “Assholes” and “sexism” when nobody has done anything wrong, unless you suppose the entire film department has an anti-woman agenda. I am a feminist, and this is exactly the kind of thing I roll my eyes at. It would have been perfectly eloquent and just to say “isn’t it a little strange that out of all these students, not a single woman was nominated?”

Yes, I’m very sure. I live with 3 of them. Who started a quarterly mini film festival to screen and promote work produced and directed by women in the film department. There are plenty of women writing, directing, and producing great films. One of my roomates will be interning at the Venice Film Fstibal. Another is in LA, meeting with a producer. Another is writing a script for a reality TV show.
Is SCAD instituting some sort of “No Girls Allowed” policy? No. Could they be doing more to ensure that their film department isn’t a complete sausage fest? Absolutely. Sexism isn’t always blatant.

Another good example is the comedy lineup at Bonnaroo. Only 3 of the comedians booked for the festival are women. Now, do I think that someone at Bonaroo held a meeting and said “Hey, we can’t have any more than 3 female comedians this year”? No. Do I think that Bonaroo didn’t do enough to scout female talent? Do I think that female comedians have a more difficulty breaking into a field that is still very much a misogynistic “boys club”? Absolutely.

Hold on, that just didn’t address the point. I didn’t say your female friends aren’t talented, and I assume you realize that their success outside of these awards has nothing to do with whether or not they made award-worthy films this year. My issue was with you claiming that someone here is a sexist asshole when it’s entirely possible that these people judged the films on their merit and nominated those they considered best.

And Bonaroo is another case of something being interesting, a case of popular sexism and not the evidence trail of misogynistic assholes in charge. Whether or not the producers of the festival consider women less funny than men is completely beside their objective. Their job is to get people to see the show, the fact that the best line-up of comedians to do that is predominately male is by virtue of what the targetable audience finds appealing, not what they find appealing.

Am I being unreasonable in requesting a slower jump from interest to speculation to outright accusal and name calling? You are not running short on logically sound (and important) examples of sexism, I’m sure of it. This isn’t one of them, though I’m sure your roommates appreciate the effort.

Hey, do you recommend attending SCAD aside from this? I ask cuz I’m a feminist girl in high school and this is really the only college that I’ve looked at and haven’t immediately hated, so hearing this is pretty upsetting.

SCAD definitely has its benefits and drawbacks. I would certainly not consider it to be an extremely misogynistic campus (we do have a budding Students for gender Equality group, and a thriving support group for queer students and their allies), but there are certainly some departments and majors that are skewed heavily towards male (visual effects, animation, game design, sequential, film/tv, sound design), and if you major in performing arts, you will encounter some professors who are pretty binarist {“Ladies, you need to wear makeup to an audition because otherwise you’ll look terrible on camera, etc”). There are lots of great opportunities, to be had, if you hustle/network/nag, but SCAD definitely likes to be confusitng and difficult to deal with, especially finances wise. If you have any other questions, you can hit me up at egorml20@student.scad.edu